A Pilgrim’s Digression

At least once a year, I take time to read The Waste Land. I never plan precisely when I will read it. Like rain after a long drought, it just happens. At one time I attempted to memorize it, but I only managed the first two “chapters,” though theose two chapters have stuck with me fairly well over the years. This morning, unable to sleep, I lay awake in the dark a long time remembering these passages before turning on the light and taking my small paperback copy of Eliot’s selected poems from the bedside table drawer. I felt that this morning was the right time, and so I sat up in bed and read The Waste Land in the early morning gloom. At five-thirty, I finished reading, closed the book, and got up for work. What shall I do now? Hot water at five-thirty. No breakfast, and out the door. Hurry up please, it’s time; doors closing. Boarding the train, the faces around me are already exhausted at six-twenty. We shuffle on like dead souls boarding for the final journey across the river. At night–”the violet hour,” Eliot calls quitting time–we return, no more happy to be returning than we were unhappy to be departing ten hours previously.

Unreal City,

Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,

A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many …

Unreal city. I sometimes feel I sleep all day and remain awake all night, though in darkness. I don’t sleep well, but my day passes in a daze. I can’t remember much of what happens to me during the work day, maybe because nothing happens and I am left to write, once again, about the grinding ritual of getting up for work in the gray early morning.

I had not thought death had undone so many.

Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled,

And each man fixed his eyes before his feet.

Flowed up the hill and down…

down East Capitol Street, and to work. Eliot worked in a bank when he wrote The Waste land, so I have always read the poem as in part a horrific reflection of the modern working life. He was also suffering marital problems, and so those troubles are also reflected in the poem. It is a long, anguished outpouring of depression and misery, comparable to Munch’s painting “The Scream.” What does it mean? Nothing, nothing. Do you know nothing? Do you see nothing? Do you remember nothing? I remember knowing what it meant once.